Finding Jesus in the Psalms: A Lenten Journey

By Barb Roose

A meaningful encounter with Jesus and the Psalms through the season of Lent with Barb Roose.

Barb Roose guides the reader through a meaningful encounter with the Psalms through the season of Lent. Combining an interpretation of the psalms with real life stories, the study moves through the familiar words of Psalm 23 toward the painful cries of Psalm 22 uttered by Jesus on the cross. The study includes reflections on the life of King David and the original context of the writings, along with connections between the psalms and the life and death of Jesus the Messiah.

“The Psalms provide a perfect framework for experiencing Lent through the verses that were Jesus’s own scriptures, offering both him and us strength and wisdom in a painful and redemptive season. The Book of Psalms hums with the heartbeat of our humanity with divinely inspired words that find purchase in the tenderest places in our hearts when our human words or wisdom fails us.” Barb Roose

Additional components to use the book as a six-week small group study include a leader guide and DVD/Video Sessions featuring Barb Roose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781791026752

Barb Roose

Barb Roose is a popular speaker and author who enjoys teaching and encouraging women at conferences and events across the country, including the Aspire Women’s Events, She Speaks, and many more. She is the author of three books, Surrendered Devotional, Winning the Worry Battle, and Enough Already, and five Bible studies, Breakthrough, Surrendered, I’m Waiting, God, Joshua, and Beautiful Already. Barb blogs regularly at BarbRoose.com and hosts the “Better Together” Facebook Live events and podcast. Barb lives in Toledo, Ohio, is a proud empty nest mom of three adult children.

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INTRODUCTION

In our Christian journey, part of trusting God comes as a result of knowing that God is consistent in both character and love. In a world where it’s hard for us to trust in anything, perhaps taking time to examine how God’s steady hand has guided our human experience back to God despite our mistakes is the comforting reassurance that we need to trust him with our lives and our eternity. In this Lenten experience, we will explore God’s words and guidance in the Psalms and find the presence of Jesus as we journey toward the cross.

I don’t know about you, but I like to know how the pieces of life fit together, especially when I’m looking at a complicated problem. When someone gives me directions, I need to know more than Just look for the white mailbox on the left. I like knowing what comes before and after; otherwise, my mind will fill in the blanks with my best guess and that doesn’t ever turn out well.

All the big existential questions that we ask, such as figuring out the meaning of life, finding our purpose, as well as how to handle pain and suffering, can be confusing when we try to navigate them on our own. Yet, God has provided a framework and a source of support and guidance to help us to navigate those questions and experience peace along the journey. I like to call this framework God’s Big Picture. When we understand our lives from God’s perspective, we find not only meaning, but hope for whatever circumstances that we’re facing in life. Without understanding God’s Big Picture, we’re at risk of interpreting our pasts, our problems, or our pain in a way that isn’t always healthy for our hearts. Without God’s Big Picture, it’s easy to wonder is anything worth it.

Long ago God knew our greatest need—your greatest need—and put a plan into place to make sure that you had access to hope and help long before the day that you were born. Discovering this is what I’ve enjoyed about creating this Lenten journey through the Book of Psalms.

In this study experience, we will specifically look at six chapters in the Psalms that pointedly identify a Savior, a Messiah, or a coming King. Here is an overview of the psalms and the themes that you’ll explore:

Psalm 2: Why Do We Need to Find Jesus in the Psalms?

Psalm 16: Finding Jesus with Us in Our Hard Places

Psalm 23: Finding Jesus as Our Shepherd

Psalm 110: Finding Jesus as Our Hope

Psalm 69: Finding Jesus as Our Strength

Psalm 22: Finding Jesus as Our Savior

Each of these psalms were chosen because they allude to the Messiah and they highlight Lenten themes that you may be focusing on this season like worship, hope, prayer, confession, forgiveness, courage, and faith. These themes may receive extra attention during Lent, but they are excellent topics to explore at any time.

One of the intriguing features of this study revolves around the multiple layers of discovery. Even as the Psalms reveal Jesus, the same Psalms also reference King David, the author of approximately half of the Book of Psalms and considered to be Israel’s greatest king. We will look at portions of King David’s life that point to more about Jesus.

However, we do need divine guidance to understand what we are reading. God provides the revelation of his Word to believers who are on a journey to seek God. It’s God who reveals the wisdom of the scriptures to us, but we can get ourselves into position to receive. There are three practical tools that we can use. These tools also equip us to avoid the trap of limiting our experience of the Psalms to either our modern, first-world perspective or religiosity.

Here are the three tools that you can keep in mind as you read:

Context: Detailing the big picture of the scripture including who is writing along with the audience, setting, and what message is being communicated in that moment.

Connection: Understanding and applying how scripture confirms itself through either relationship, symbols, or prophecy connections.

Jesus-Glasses: Looking for how the passage directly references or alludes to Jesus and how that impacts our perspective.

Finding Jesus in the Psalms isn’t a game of hide-and-go-seek. God didn’t lead the scriptural authors in the Book of Psalms to take us on a wild hunt to find Jesus peeking at us in one verse and then hiding in the next. Rather, God’s intention is for us to see and understand how Jesus spans our human history so that when we’re looking at questions with no earthly answers, we can see the divine truth in Christ, his power, but most of all his love for you and me. In this Lenten journey, we find the presence of Christ in the ancient scriptures and the words that were on his lips as he moved toward the cross. The Psalms provide a perfect framework for experiencing Lent through the verses that were Jesus’s own scriptures, offering both him and us strength and wisdom in a painful and redemptive season.

CHAPTER ONE

Why Do We Need to Find Jesus in the Psalms?

Scripture Reading: Psalm 2, Romans 8

What is your earliest memory of Jesus?

For me, it’s the memory of seeing a bronzed form of Jesus hanging on the wooden cross that was mounted on the wood paneled wall of the black Baptist church that I attended as a child. His head was down with stringy hair fallen forward and frozen in place. Even now, I’m unsure if the sculptor formed the image visualizing an alive Jesus barely clinging to life or a no longer living Jesus, fully crucified. Either way, I’m not sure if the adults around me considered how jarring it is for a little kid to repeatedly see a sized-down replica of a bronze, emaciated man with his head down wearing a sagging towel with arms stretched out, legs crossed, and glued to a piece of wood? The adults in my church passed by the Jesus-on-the-cross and carried on with business as usual, but as a kid, I had questions. Since there wasn’t children’s church back then, I sat in the adult service and heard the boom of the pastor’s voice, Come to the cross. Give your heart and life to Jesus, while he pointed at the large cross behind him. While I loved the stories that my mother used to teach about Jesus with the little kids, I wasn’t sure about giving my heart to the inanimate man suspended on wood because what if I ended up on a cross like that? No, thank you, pastor. Another more practical concern about the Jesus-plaque: What was keeping that little slip of cloth clinging to his waist? I didn’t see any safety pins or belts. It didn’t seem quite right that half-naked forms of Jesus were hanging up everywhere. Sure, I’d find out later that his clothes were gambled away, but as a little kid, I didn’t have context and without context, I was confused.

How often are our earliest memories of Jesus summed up with little snapshots that come from either a memory, distorted or real, from church or a snippet of a Bible story? If you were raised in church or attend regularly, much of what we learn about Jesus starts in the New Testament, beginning with the Christmas story and ending around Easter with Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. For those who fancy themselves a little more biblically familiar, you’re aware of various references to Jesus spread around the Old Testament by various people at different times. However, since we don’t see Jesus mentioned by name in the Old Testament, could it be possible that we’re overlooking or even missing a powerful piece, maybe even we could say peace, to our faith? Without understanding God’s complete plan concerning Christ, it’s easy for us to be confused, especially when life is uncertain or you’re carrying hard questions about God without answers.

We’re familiar with God as a central figure in the Bible and yes, we consider Jesus to be just as important. However, since we see God’s name in the Old and New Testaments, it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that people give God more attention. Yet, what if Jesus was just as prominent in the Old Testament as the New Testament? That maybe a fresh new thought for some of you. Hundreds of prophecies were given about Jesus before he came to earth, including various allusions, symbols, and metaphoric language about Jesus that many of us have missed. There’s a solid reference to Jesus in the Old Testament that points beyond the story of the Israelites’ struggles and can help us better understand the heart of God.

For as long as humans have walked on earth, we’ve tried to figure out God. As much as God has revealed himself to humanity through creation (Psalm 19:1), his love (John 3:16), and his Word (2 Timothy 3:16-17), humans have misunderstood the heart of God, especially when we’re in pain. As believers, we’re not immune to those hard heart questions when our lives clash with the wages of sin that pay back all kinds of death to humanity.

Even now, there are hard questions about our fallen world that often rattle the faithful. Why doesn’t God fix this? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is life so hard? Does God even care about what I’m going through? Can God possibly love me even though I have done something wrong?

Perhaps this list of questions stirred up others for you. While I can’t promise that this Lenten study experience will offer satisfactory answers to all your questions, I can promise that you’ll take a journey to see and know that Jesus is our hope amid those questions. Of course, dropping the Jesus Cares on these hard questions isn’t taking the easy way out. If you’ve asked one or more of these questions, I want you to know that God saw your heart, your hurt, and your confusion. Even now, God sees the battle that you may be waging just to hold onto the short string of faith that you’ve got left because religion hasn’t helped—or religion has hurt you enough to drive you away.

In this day and time, there are a lot of people who are critical of God because their concept of God hasn’t held up to the realities of their lives. Pain and disappointment scream louder than a two-year-old that wants a cookie. Perhaps even you have felt like God has taken away or kept your cookie from you, whether it was an answer to your prayer, or an answer for why he allowed something to happen.

What’s interesting is that as much as our world has changed, God has not. He is not oblivious to our problems, nor is he caught off guard by our struggles. He knows our questions, our frustrations, our disappointments, and our longing and his response is and always has been the same: Jesus. While the Bible is filled with lots of stories about fascinating people, supernatural events, and puzzling interactions between God and creation, the story of the scriptures is about Jesus. When we forget that, we not only forfeit the riches of wisdom and understanding that God promises us as believers (Romans 11:33) but we also lose out on experiencing God’s blessings and promises in our life right here and right now.

God is a proactive, not a reactive God. His Big Picture has always included Jesus as the solution for every stage of human history, every culture, every generation, every family, and every person, including you. Yet, we tend to include Jesus only when it’s convenient for us.

For almost fourteen years, I worked on staff at my local church. If your church is anything like mine, you know that the two church services with the highest attendance are Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. While church attendance trends have declined over the decades, those two dates stir up our religious roots, even those with dormant or nearly dead roots. We’ve even got nicknames for the fringe-faithful like C&Eers and Chreasters. If you can, double down for a moment on any religious guilt that might be arising. This discussion isn’t about how often you do or don’t go to church. Rather, the big picture of this discussion is how we’ve limited Jesus to our human confines and whether our imposed limitations have served us well.

This elevates a crucial question: When we